Size matters! The scalability of modern hunter-gatherer animism

摘要

Cultural anthropology has for decades been committed to the tenet that all cultures deserve equal scholarly consideration, regardless of population or community size. In this article, I argue that the minuscule size of hunter-gatherer communities, as well as how they scale and imagine their worlds, are critical factors that should not be glossed over in their study. To illustrate my point, I examine the distortive effect of scale-blind research on a long-studied topic currently drawing renewed interest: indigenous animism. I demonstrate how uncritical use of key terms in analyzing animism, without regard for scale, inadvertently leads to serious disfiguring of hunter-gatherer worlds. I then factor scale into reanalysis of a South Indian forager community known as Nayaka that I started studying in the late 1970s. I argue that the Nayaka animistic cosmos is best understood in terms of a plurispecies community of local beings who are present in each other's lives, rather than in terms of human and nonhuman "persons" and "societies." (c) 2017 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved.